Village Life
A village of 600 simulated lives, played across generations.
The problem
Life sims usually simulate a household and fake the town around it. Village Life goes the other way: simulate the whole village - every resident, every relationship, every consequence - and let the player live inside it for generations.
The build
Elmsgarth is a fictional village in North East England with a population cap of 600, where every resident is procedurally generated with their own personality, finances, health, education and relationships. The systems talk to each other: gossip spreads, illness travels, crimes ripple through the community, the council holds elections and the local paper reports on them, schools hand out qualifications that shape careers. When your character dies, you don't stop playing - wills execute, inheritance flows, and you take over another villager and carry the story on.
The result
A substantial simulation in build: 479 C# scripts and 85,000+ lines across health, education, crime and justice, politics, economy, relationships and legacy systems - core systems compiled and in scene, heading toward a first playtest.
The human bit
It's set where I'm from. Elmsgarth is fictional, but it's unmistakably the North East - the names, the dialect in the dialogue engine, the faith and weather of the place, even a hilltop monument locals will recognise. The most ambitious of the games, built patiently.
Under the hood
Unity 6 (6000.0.69f1) with C# and URP. Fully data-driven - 95 enum definitions and 86 data-model classes describe the village's vocabulary; NPCs are generated, not hand-placed. Status: in build, pre-playtest.
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